Vaccinating is exhausting

Coronavirus Vaccination Clinic 2 (the Portakabin), March 2021

You've had to wait for it, but the answer to the puzzle of what's in the bag hanging from my clothes airer relates to the fact that due to overconsumption and lack of willpower I had to go cold turkey on chocolate and snacks. I still had quite a large supply in the house and didn't want to throw them out, which meant that they had to be more inaccessible. Hence, hanging them up out of reach and out of sight. It worked quite well.

I've done a lot of reading in the last month as evidenced by the huge blog post last week, but there's also been a lot of other activity. The physiotherapist is suggesting that the longstanding issue with my hip is probably the source of the problem with my knee, and has changed my exercises. I am finding it increasingly difficult to motivate myself to actually do the exercises. And I have attended a very interesting Zoom webinar about the Libre 'Flash Glucose Monitoring' technology in diabetes, and I wonder if my colleagues already know about the things I learned.

I have been on annual leave from that job and signed up to many vaccination shifts, some of which were cancelled. We are doing far more work compared with that first session when I was shown the ropes - enthusiastic people are coming for their second dose as well as a few unenthusiastically turning up for their first.

We are now using iPads instead of paper forms to track our vaccinations, which I'm sure saves an enormous amount of data input, but relies heavily on our systems finding the individual. This means that the NHS number is quite important, name and date of birth being surprisingly unreliable. Obviously nobody knows their NHS number, but there is a website where it can be found, and so notices were put up asking people to type the long URL on their phones. This is quite difficult, so I suggested to the people doing the clerking that they could generate a QR code, at which they looked very blank.

I've only just started to appreciate the power of the QR code, which is the two-dimensional bar code that can be scanned by a phone camera and take you to a website. It was suggested to me for a diet sheet I was writing where I wanted people to have a look at a set of YouTube videos. The diet sheet would almost always be printed and provided to patients on paper so a clickable link would be useless, and even a shortened version of the URL would still be difficult to type, so I was just going to suggest that people searched on YouTube for keywords that would take them to the videos. A Young Person (now defined by me as someone under the age of 30) who has joined our diabetes dietetic team had the great idea of using a QR code, and it worked beautifully.

Reception in the Portakabin clinic

So I went off and produced some notices with QR codes for the clerks, and even laminated them (because: infection control), and handed them over on my next shift which was more than a week later (because: cancelled shifts). I think they made life a little easier - I wasn't in the same room as the clerks for most of the time so I really don't know how they were being used. But this picture of the reception area shows one of them on display.

Proximity alarms being charged

The other innovation is a proximity alarm worn around the neck, which vibrates and/or beeps when it is within 2 meters of another proximity alarm. These are given to patients when they check in and are supposed to make sure they stay 2 meters apart from each other. Obviously staff aren't wearing them because we can't vaccinate from 2 meters away, but we have extra face shields or goggles as well as masks and we test ourselves regularly using lateral flow kits.

The hardest thing about the shifts is the need to be standing up for six hours (with half an hour allowed for a break). The shift starts early and finishes at 2pm, then this week I had my weekly shop to do afterward, and needed to make some soup while I had time and before all the veg went mouldy. By the time I'd finished all that it was 5 p.m. and I was shattered, so I thought I'd have a nap. I became conscious again two and a half hours later, had some supper and went back to bed.